Actors frequently come to me because they want the ability to “cry on cue.”
Can I help with that? Well…yes.
Will you be able to produce salty water from your eyes on-demand? That depends upon your own lacrimal gland functioning. Some people have medical dry-eye, for heaven’s sake. For the perfect, dewy tear? Well, that’s why God created glycerin… and filmmakers do know this.
Honestly, I only know of one actor who could produce perfect crocodile tears on cue, and despite being a beautiful ingénue, after a couple of Under-Five jobs on various soap operas, she disappeared into well-earned obscurity… because she was about as deep as a damp paper bag!
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Most North Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.
We look forward to both Feeling and expressing, gratitude, which everybody agrees is a good! But - A big BUT - Family interpersonal dynamics, as we all know, are complicated! These complications make it very difficult in any given year to express, much less to feel, thankful. Some of our loved ones make us so angry that it's hard for us not to ‘pop ‘em one in the eye’. We certainly can't feel thankful for them when we are mad as hell. What to do?
From an ALBA Technique point of view, I suggest that even those of you who have not yet had a chance to work with me, can begin doing something. Observe yourself! As I (only partially joking) say, "Observation is All!"
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Yeah, good thought, Mr. Roosevelt. But…I’ve done what I can today, with what little I had, and now I am at home…I am racing mentally, and I NEED TO POWER DOWN…but can’t. So what do I do with this restlessness or anxiety I have at home where I am, dammit?!
OOOh, Alba Student…a little Anger overlay, mayhap?
As you know, One needs to develop One’s own unique structures for working with our individual body/mind challenges. So let us think about the WithIN of You and theWithOUT of You. Sometimes we need pick-me-ups, sometimes we need help with slow-me-downs.
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Every person is an absolute, unrepeatable individual---but our emotions---the 6 core emotions--are cross-cultural, primitive, ancient as mankind and universal. They are the same in Borneo, Japan, Kenya, Chile, France, Ireland, Russia, China, and the good ol’ US-of-A. We all have inborn access to the Primitive "Precious 7.”
"…breathing accompanies the emotion, and it is possible to enter into the feeling through the breath, provided one could discriminate which breathing corresponds to which emotion." — Antonin Artaud (1932)
Actors/artists do not like to feel "reduced" to the technical. We like creative, chaotic mystery. Alba does not reduce us.
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For one with the courage to go to the very edge of one’s own comfort zone, the reward is nothing less then coming to the awesome, terrible beauty of the authentic, core emotional self.
We are emotional beings. From the time we are babies we are emotional. Human emotion is a “terrible beauty,” to borrow from poet W. B. Yeats; each complex emotion we have, shifting like quicksilver in time, has a Terrible Beauty.
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